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The undirected edge geography is a two-player combinatorial game on an undirected rooted graph. The players alternatively perform a move consisting of choosing an edge incident to the root vertex, removing the chosen edge, and marking the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-17 Tharit Sereekiatdilok , Panupong Vichitkunakorn

A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2012-12-03 Sam Buss , Michael Soltys

Given a c-colored graph G, a vertex of G is happy if it has the same color as all its neighbors. The notion of happy vertices was introduced by Zhang and Li to compute the homophily of a graph. Eto, et al. introduced the Maker-Maker version…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Mathieu Hilaire , Perig Montfort , Nacim Oijid

In a vertex-colored graph, an edge is happy if its endpoints have the same color. Similarly, a vertex is happy if all its incident edges are happy. Motivated by the computation of homophily in social networks, we consider the algorithmic…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-05-24 N. R. Aravind , Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram , Anjeneya Swami Kare , Juho Lauri

We initiate the study of a new variant of the Maker-Breaker positional game, which we call multistage game. Given a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}=(\mathcal{X},\mathcal{F})$ and a bias $b \ge 1$, the $(1:b)$ multistage Maker-Breaker game on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-04-25 Juri Barkey , Dennis Clemens , Fabian Hamann , Mirjana Mikalački , Amedeo Sgueglia

The Maker-Breaker domination game (MBD game) is a two-player game played on a graph $G$ by Dominator and Staller. They alternately select unplayed vertices of $G$. The goal of Dominator is to form a dominating set with the set of vertices…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-10 Athira Divakaran , Tanja Dravec , Tijo James , Sandi Klavžar , Latha S Nair

The analysis of several algorithms and data structures can be framed as a peeling process on a random hypergraph: vertices with degree less than k and their adjacent edges are removed until no vertices of degree less than k are left. Often…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-06-03 Michael Mitzenmacher , Vikram Nathan

A new combinatorial game is given. It generalizes both Substraction and Nim. It is proved the computation of Nash equilibrium points in this new game is NP-hard.

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Chunlei Liu

"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-01-27 Jens Maßberg

We consider the problem of partitioning a graph into a non-fixed number of non-overlapping subgraphs of maximum density. The density of a partition is the sum of the densities of the subgraphs, where the density of a subgraph is its average…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Cristina Bazgan , Katrin Casel , Pierre Cazals

We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Kevin Buchin , Mart Hagedoorn , Irina Kostitsyna , Max van Mulken , Jolan Rensen , Leo van Schooten

Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Pete Austin , Nicolas Mazzocchi , Sougata Bose , Patrick Totzke

The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alessandro Giovanni Alberti , Flavio Chierichetti , Mirko Giacchini , Daniele Muscillo , Alessandro Panconesi , Erasmo Tani

We show that the Minesweeper game is PP-hard, when the object is to locate all mines with the highest probability. When the probability of locating all mines may be infinitesimal, the Minesweeper game is even PSPACE-complete. In our…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2012-04-23 Michiel de Bondt

We consider the following two-player game: Maxi and Mini start with the empty graph on $n$ vertices and take turns, always adding one additional edge to the graph such that the chromatic number is at most $k$, where $k \in \mathbb{N}$ is a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Ralph Keusch

Zero forcing is a deterministic iterative graph colouring process in which vertices are coloured either blue or white, and in every round, any blue vertices that have a single white neighbour force these white vertices to become blue. Here…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Natalie C. Behague , Trent Marbach , Pawel Pralat

Given an increasing graph property $\cal F$, the strong Avoider-Avoider $\cal F$ game is played on the edge set of a complete graph. Two players, Red and Blue, take turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges with Red going first, and the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Miloš Stojaković , Jelena Stratijev

We prove that Strings-and-Coins -- the combinatorial two-player game generalizing the dual of Dots-and-Boxes -- is strongly PSPACE-complete on multigraphs. This result improves the best previous result, NP-hardness, argued in Winning Ways.…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Erik D. Demaine , Jenny Diomidova

In a Take-Away Game on hypergraphs, two players take turns to remove the vertices and the hyperedges of the hypergraphs. In each turn, a player must remove either a single vertex or a hyperedge. When a player chooses to remove one vertex,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-03-21 T. H. Molena

We study the NP-hard Fair Connected Districting problem recently proposed by Stoica et al. [AAMAS 2020]: Partition a vertex-colored graph into k connected components (subsequently referred to as districts) so that in every district the most…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Niclas Boehmer , Tomohiro Koana , Rolf Niedermeier